The Smart City Of Milton Keynes

The Smart City Of Milton Keynes

In his latest article Bernard Marr on Forbes tech presents interesting facts about the Smart City of Milton Keynes in UK. According to the author Milton Keynes Council was unsuccessful in the first attempts to acquire funding for a pilot project, it persevered and was eventually awarded an 8 million (EUR 11.2 million) grant from the UK Higher Education Funding Council, which was match-funded by BT (British Telecom), which became a partner on the project, alongside the Open University.

According to the article Milton Keynes Council decided to implement different projects on the following areas:

Energy: Homes being used to test a variety of energy saving technology, and a number of families are taking part in a trial to assess the viability of relying on electric cars for a year.

Transport: Later this year, the first driverless cars to be used in the UK will take to the streets of Milton Keynes for initial testing.

Urban planning: High definition satellite imagery and overlaying it with data from the planning department, will assure the town is growing in the correct manner in-line with planning guidelines and local growth plans.

Environment: A sensor network has also been rolled out across all 80 of the councils neighbourhood recycling centres to monitor them.

Data analytics: All the data generated with these projects as well as other data collected by the council during its regular activities, will be collated as part of another project called MK:Smart. This will be a data hub which also takes in data from local and national open sources, infrastructure networks such as energy, public transport and water, satellite imagery and social media.

Public information: In collaboration with a private company they are working on applying analytics routines to data collected through the MK:Smart projects, including the implementation of dashboard systems to provide an overview of all of the data streams. The council will monitor the social media as well, to assess how effectively communicates socially with the public compared to other authorities, as well as with a trial of smart street lighting technology in the area close to its offices.

Business model: The article concludes emphasing the efforts of the council to move from the R&D phase into real business models and finding which projects can support themselves, to move into full service deployment.